According to latest statistics, China received a total of 828,328 patent applications in 2008. Of which, 717,144 were domestic patent applications, accounting for 86.6 percent of the total number of applications. Of all received domestic patent applications, the number of invention patent applications reached 194,579, up 27.1 percent from the previous year. In 2008, China authorized a total of 411,982 patents. Of these, the number of China’s domestic patents stood at 352,406, accounting for 85.5 percent of the total and an increase of 16.8 percent compared with the previous year. By the end of 2008, China had cumulatively received 4,853,506 patent applications, of which, it authorized 2,501,268.
In 2008, the main highlight of China’s authorization of patent applications was that for the first time, the proportion of invention patent applications made by domestic employees exceeded that of non-employee invention patent applications. This rapid increase of employee invention patent applications can be attributed to a rapid increase in patent applications made by enterprises. In 1998, the number of patent applications made by domestic enterprises was just 27,179. In 2008, this figure was 295,510, a ten-fold increase over ten years, with an annual average growth rate of 27.0 percent.
Domestic enterprise applications had three “remarkable increases.” First, the number of enterprises that filed patent applications increased notably. In 2007, there were about 32,700 enterprises that filed patent applications; by 2008, the figure reached 40,500, up 23.9 percent. Second, the average number of patent applications filed by a single enterprise increased greatly. In 2007, the average number of patent applications filed by a domestic enterprise applicant was only 6.83; in 2008, the figure grew to 7.29, an increase of 6.7 percent. Third, the number of enterprises that filed more than 100 patent applications increased substantially. There were 420 such enterprises in 2008, up 44.8 percent.
